Small But Mighty Episode 5: Bryn Bamber passing on perfectionism

Bryn Bamber cares deeply about making a difference in the world and doing work that’s meaningful to her personally and to those she’s working with. As you’ll hear in her story, that sincere desire to do good can have consequences, especially when a perfectionist mindset takes over. Bryn shared how she worked through this challenge in her career and how it led her to start a business to help other women and non-binary people with similar struggles.

Be sure to connect with Bryn on her website, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And if you’re struggling with shame (or even if you’re not), sign up for Bryn’s free webinar, From Shame to Your Aligned Business.

Full episode transcript:

Karen Wilson: Hi there. Thanks for joining me today on Small but Mighty Biz Stories. Today I'm pleased to have Bryn Bamber on, a Core Energetics practitioner who specializes in helping female and non-binary entrepreneurs get past the blocks that are keeping their business from thriving. Hi Bryn. Welcome to the podcast.

Bryn Bamber: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Karen: You're welcome. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Bryn: Sure. I am a mental health professional trained in Core Energetics, as you mentioned, which is a modality that brings together the body, the mind, and the spirit. I work specifically with entrepreneurs and helping them do the deep inner work that is sometimes holding them back in their business. Sometimes you need a business strategist that can help you with your marketing plan and all of those things, and that's super important. That's not what I do.

What I do is when you know the strategy, you know what steps you should be taking, but you're hitting some roadblocks. You're maybe in perfectionism and your working on your website forever and ever and ever and not publishing it. Maybe you're getting emails from perspective clients, but it takes you a while to get to them. You're sabotaging yourself in these micro ways we sometimes do. What I help with is help you get underneath what's really happening.

Sometimes my clients will have been bullied. There's a part of them that doesn't want to put themselves out there in a group because they don't want to have a negative experience like that again. Some of my clients have trauma in their history. It's looking at the deeper issues that might be holding you back from doing the work you're meant to do, helping the people you're meant to help.

Karen: That's great. Talk a little bit about Core Energetics. What is it? How do you do the work that you do around that?

Bryn: Awesome question. Core Energetics is similar, in some ways, to talk therapy. It's similar in the sense that we do look at your childhood, the patterns and habits that started, the coping mechanisms you developed as a child that you might be bringing into your life today, into your current relationships, and into your relationships with your clients or customers. We do talk about it and piece that together, that story of what's happening.

The major difference between talk therapy and what I do is we also work with the body. An example is, if as a child you were not allowed to express anger because your caregivers or your parents either yelled at you or withdrew their love. they would not pay attention or made fun of you or even hurt you, you learned that anger was not going to work for you.

The way that a child would stop a tantrum, say they're five and they're angry, but they're like, "This isn't going to go well," the way that they would do that is that they would hold their breath, they would tense their shoulders a little bit, the want to punch the air, but they have to hold their hands by their sides. If you do that for years and years, for decades—many of us end up in these kind of coping strategies for decades—it creates chronic tension in the body.

Folks who have suppressed anger they often have chronic tension in their shoulder, in their neck, in their jaw, sometimes even in their hips from these years and years of holding the anger in physically.

In addition to talking about whatever experiences impacted you as a child and created the strategies that you use to navigate the world, I'm also going to be helping you to work with these patterns that are actually solidified in your body. Just to understand it intellectually someone who had a negative experience with anger as a child, maybe terrified now to express their anger. Part of that is working with these physical blocks of tension. Then we also do other things that are like role-playing and having the client really get angry, physically angry, stomp their feet, yell and have them have an experience where they get angry and no one shames them this time. No one hurts them this time, no one makes fun of them, to start to teach your nervous system that it is, in fact, safe for you to be angry now.

When you think about building a business, anger is very necessary. If someone crosses a boundary in your business, whether it's a client who doesn't want to pay you or was texting you after hours or whatever the issue might be, having that anger to cue you to set those boundaries is super essential. If there's a part of you that's really scared of your own anger, sometimes it's harder to set those boundaries.

Karen: That's interesting because there's so much that we get pressure, especially as women when it comes to the more negative emotions. There's so much pressure not to express those emotions and yet anger is valid. It is necessary. It's frustrating to see that people are suppressing those things that can actually help them, as opposed to finding a productive way to express them.

Bryn: Yes, totally. That's exactly the kind of thing that we're working on. It's true. It does happen in your childhood, but it's also a bigger systemic issue for women.

Karen: Do you have clients that are coming in and maybe they didn't have those things go on in childhood, but just the system that we live in and work in has created similar issues with pent up anger that's affecting the body?

Bryn: Yes. I would say any kind of formative experience that happened, it doesn't necessarily have to be with your caregivers. We're very malleable as children and young adults. Just even seeing things on TV.

I just did a podcast that I haven't released yet on certain words, certain swear words, that I don't know if I'm allowed to say on your podcast.

Karen: You're welcome to say whatever words you would like to say.

Bryn: I did a podcast about the word “bitch,” the word “diva,” the word “crazy,” and the word “selfish,” and how those four words impact women deeply and make it hard for us to set boundaries, to say no, to be angry. When I was talking about divas I was talking about knowing what you want and asking for it, being specific, and saying, "This is what I need." Sometimes women are shamed for being a diva.

Karen: True.

Bryn: There's a lot of stuff in the air even. It seems like the air we breathe in a patriarchal society that is going to impact you. Ultimately, if you do feel ashamed, which I don't at all want to fault any women that do feel ashamed for being angry or feel ashamed for being specific because that's how you grew up. That's where you grew up, but that shame will hold you back in your business. That's part of the work that I'm doing is helping to heal that shame, whether it did come from your caregivers specifically or society at large.

Karen: I hear women all the time who are struggling with pricing products according to their value or they've been told that the prices are too high when I'm looking at them and going, "This is not enough for what you're doing." It's amazing all these mixed messages we get and I actually found out recently about another business owner I know, who was told by a business owner who makes over six figures a year. High, high six figures nearly a million, and she was told by this woman that her prices were too high and she's not. It's very disappointing to hear stories like that where women are not supporting other women the way that we should be because it makes you wonder how we get better. How does this get better if we aren't even supported by other women?

Bryn: Yes, there are tonnes of stories about all this unpaid labor that women are supposed to do. We're supposed to be caregivers, we're sometimes supposed to be the pseudo therapist for your partner or your spouse. There's all these swaths of unpaid labor that it's just—again, that comes into what I was talking about the word selfish. If you want to get paid or if you do happen to be a woman who's a homemaker and you think about the amount of scheduling you're doing for your kids' activities, the cooking, and the cleaning, it's a lot of work. It's many more hours of work often than someone who works a nine to five, but somehow it's not seen as valuable or it doesn't have the dollar amount attached to it.

I was listening to a podcast recently where a woman CEO interviewed her executive assistant who she pays very well, which isn't the norm.

Karen: No, it's not.

Bryn: What she was saying is that "I really value what this woman does for me." Part of the podcast was all of the things, arranging her travel, arranging her meetings, she's the last line of defense who gets a meeting with this woman and making sure that their technology is working, so they're not wasting this woman CEO's time. She was saying, "I pay her a lot because A, I want her to be the best and I don't want to lose her. I don't want her to move on to some other role." That just made me think. It was like, "Oh, why don't we pay secretaries well?" I think we don't pay secretaries well because traditionally it was a job that was done by women and the work was undervalued.

I think it's super important and I think it is sad in those instances where a woman doesn't support another woman to raise her prices. I want to say I've seen a lot of the opposite as well. I've actually been surprised coming out as an entrepreneur and joining female entrepreneur communities and how much support there has been.

Karen: Absolutely. Actually, you and I met on a SheEO call recently and those have been such an energizing force this summer. They're virtual, but you get on these calls and the positive energy from everyone and the support in those groups that we go into, it's beautiful.

Bryn: Yes, I love it and I'm surprised by it. I was thinking today, I was like, "I want to stop being surprised." I think it's good to be touched and also I want to start having a different mindset because I think there are stories in the culture too that women are going to be competitive with each other. There's a lot of collaboration and lifting each other up.

Karen: I think my initial reaction was surprise and now it's morphed into delight, because it's this part of my day that is so positive and uplifting. Then I get to move on with other things that I have more energy and I'm motivated in a way that I wasn't necessarily before I got on those calls. I think that's the energy I'm getting from it is delight.

Bryn: Super amazing.

Karen: I want to back up a little bit because I've been doing a little bit of research about you and like many people these days, myself included, your past to this work wasn't a straight line and I wanted to ask you what led you to work in this space of mental health and doing the core energetics practice?

Bryn: I feel like there's multiple answers to that, but I guess I'll start with I have struggled as a perfectionist for a long time and I got my first full-time job in the non-profit sector when I was probably 21. I was working with marginalized youth, which was my goal and in some ways, I loved the job and it was my dream job. In other ways, it was very, very difficult for me. I was in Thunder Bay, Ontario up north and I was running a satellite office for the non-profit by myself, so I was doing all. I was a one-woman show doing all the jobs from the stapling of the handouts, all the way up to meeting with judges and the heads of youth custody facilities, and going into these intense situations.

Karen: That's a lot.

Bryn: Yes, and I was 21.

Essentially, I burnt out. I made a few mistakes, which it was really hard for me to forgive myself, even though my boss and everyone like that was supportive and saw it as mistakes happen and this is a learning opportunity, but I had a hard time forgiving myself and my perfectionism really amped up after some of the mistakes I made. I got to this place where I was quite debilitated. I would write an email and then I would edit it and then I would edit it, and then I would edit it and it would take me a whole week to send out an email that was 100 words or something very short.

I got to this place where it wasn't working and I didn't know what to do. I was at this crossroads where I was like, "This is my dream job and I love it, but I can't do it. I feel totally drained." I didn't want to get up in the morning to go to work. I ended up going on this hiking trip by myself, this overnight hiking trip, and having a moment on the shores of Lake Superior and just getting this message that I needed to quit, I needed to leave. I was terrified. I was terrified of what others would think of me and what I would do with my finances and all of these things.

I sat by the lake and I had all these fears come up and then I had loving responses come up to all the fears. I was like, "It's okay. Some people might judge you, but that's okay. Financially, you're going to be okay. You have some savings." I didn't quit right away. I went back and then I was like, "Oh, maybe that was a hallucination."

Karen: The stories we tell ourselves.

Bryn: That was November and then December I was helping to create this documentary about young women in a youth custody facility and we did the shoot for that. We did a one-day shoot and all these young women told their stories. At the end of the day, I was just like dead. It was so important and beautiful. It was so heartbreaking to hear story after story of young women that were taken away from their families, none of the women in the youth custody facilities were living at home when they got arrested. They were all in CAS or with a foster family who didn't really care for them. Then they turned to drugs or alcohol, usually at age 11 or 12, and somehow ended up in contact with the justice system after that.

I think after that I realized I love this work and it's so important, and it still needs to be done and I need a break. I need to figure something out here. I finally did give in my notice. I think I gave like six months’ notice or something.

Karen: You really didn't want to leave them in a lurch.

Bryn: Yes, I gave them a lot of notice. I knew I couldn't go back to the job board because I would just look for a similar job and so I ended up moving to an ashram. I decided to go live in this spiritual community and I studied yoga and meditation. I studied my mind. I initially went for a month, but I ended up extending and extending and extending and ended up living there for over two years and becoming a yoga teacher. That's a whole long story to say, I think I ended up as a mental health professional because I had some real struggles myself with mental health and with burnout. I wasn't able to cope with the stress of a job, even a job that I loved.

The funny part of the story is I ended up living at this ashram for two years. Then I ended up reapplying for the same organization and getting rehired and going back to work with not exactly the same youth, but very similar groups of youth and got to continue doing that work that I felt was important.

Karen: That's great. How did it go after your time at the ashram? Were you in a better place with being able to control that tendency to perfectionism?

Bryn: Yes, for sure. I definitely learned at this particular ashram that I was at, which is Yasodhara Ashram in British Columbia. It's amazing if anyone is interested in that kind of spiritual development and a very holistic lens on yoga, where it's not just about the physical Asanas, but we did dream yoga and Raja Yoga, which is meditation and jhana yoga, which is the study of knowledge. It's much more holistic than some yoga centers these days.

We journaled a lot there. A lot of what we did is we would do a little meditation and then the teacher would ask us a question and then we would journal. It was stilling the mind and tuning in, and then writing and learning about all these patterns and habits that I had. I started to be able to see my perfectionism more clearly.

When I was 21, I don't even know if I would have told you I was a perfectionist. I just thought I was normal or everyone was like this. Through the work at the ashram, I started to see my tendencies more clearly and be able to start to change them. I had more capacity for discomfort in the job. I had more of a capacity to make mistakes and learn from them, as opposed to make mistakes and just crumble into a ball and not want to get up. It was a very interesting experience to be able to see how much I'd changed being in the same job, having some similar experiences, and seeing how I was more resilient after.

Karen: That's great. You went back to the not-for-profit and eventually left there again.

Bryn: Yes.

Karen: How did you end up starting your business?

Bryn: I went back to the not-for-profit. I moved to Toronto because that was where the job was. They had realized that the satellite office that I ran was not sustainable. They didn't have a budget for more than one person and they just realized one person can't do all that and have no colleagues and have no support. No one lasted in that job for more than a year. That's validating in some ways.

Karen: That's a lot to take on because of all of the different mental shifts and activity, just what you described going from collating papers to meeting with judges. That's a huge mental shift to make. And if you're doing it that often, I can imagine how that would lead to burnout and anxiety.

Bryn: Yes, totally. That office was closed. I applied for a job at the Toronto office and got hired. At that time, I had realized I did want to go into mental health. When I was at the ashram, part of what we did was look at things like neuroscience, this isn't the type of spiritual community where science is pushed to the side, but it's looking at these things together. I had read The Brain That Changes Itself, which is a pop neuroscience book about neuroplasticity in adults.

Karen: It’s such an interesting topic.

Bryn: It's so life-changing. I remember being like, "Oh my goodness." Just little tiny things where I was like, I'm—spatially, I'm not that great. It's not my strong suit. I'm bad with directions and getting lost and that kind of thing and just reading that book and being like, "Oh, but I can still improve." Even though I don't have like a natural talent at finding my way, I can get better. That's something I can work on. It's not that my brain is just fixed and I just will always be the worst at directions ever. That was a super freeing book.

I read, When the Body Says No, by Gabor Mate, who was a physician in British Columbia, which talked about how sometimes if we don't learn how to say no and set boundaries in our life, our body will shut down and the scientific links between autoimmune disease and people not saying no, which was super fascinating. I read Peter Levine's, Waking the Tiger, which is about trauma in the body and healing trauma.

These books were all part of my yoga teacher training, to do the advanced yoga teacher training before. One of the prerequisites is you have to do a book reflection project, where you read 30 books. Some of them are required and then some of them you can choose from a whole list of books. Then you have a question that you're exploring and you write papers on each of the books. I developed this interest in mental health, in the brain, in psychology.

I found a program that I wanted to attend that was in dance psychotherapy. I've been a dancer for a long time. I love dancing. It was like, "This seems perfect. I love neuroscience. I love psychology. I love dance. This is bringing them together." When I actually moved back for the nonprofit job, my goal was to save some money for the program because I've been living in an ashram for two years and I didn't have—my savings were not where they were when I started at the ashram. When I went back to the nonprofit job, it wasn't with the idea that it would be permanent. The way that I actually started my business, this is such a long story, oh my God.

The way I started my business is, I had started writing poetry when I was at the ashram. We had this fundraiser where you could do 108 anything. You could do 108 sun salutations or you could draw 108 pictures or you could make 108 videos and I was doing 108 poems. People would sponsor me the same way— like jump rope for heart or whatever, but I would get sponsors to write all these poems. I've done that twice and we would do it within a 30-day period. It was this is intensive. I was writing three or four poems a day. It's a super fun project to be a part of.

I had, at the end, 260 poems, 16 poems from doing it twice. I was like, "Maybe I should take the best stuff and make a book of poetry." I was looking into that, I started to work on that, read all the poems, and look for themes. I was just doing that in my spare time, while I was working for nonprofit. Then I came across this book marketing coach who helps you seed market your book, who is savvy to the ways of the internet, and how book publishing has really changed and how to get a book published has changed. I ended up hiring him to help me work on this book and to really to help me market the book.

One of the things he said was, "You need to have a Twitter following and do all these things."

Bryn: At that time, the working title of the book was "Finding Courage," because that was the running theme in a lot of my poems was about courage. He was like, "You need to be a courage expert. You need to teach online workshops on courage." To which my first response was like, "No, that won't be happening. We'll find another way. I'm not doing that." I worked with him for a few months and eventually, I came around to the idea of putting myself out on the internet as a courage expert. My first free workshop I ever ran was on courage. That was the start of my business.

It was starting to run. I did a free one and then I did a paid one. Then I started to work one on one with clients, working on "courage" and then I found that I really liked doing 'Courage in your Career.' That was my first pivot. I started working with one on one clients, helping them have courage in their career, to ask for the raise or to do what they wanted to do.

Karen: Those are important things to address, especially early on in your career because if you get used to holding back and not asking for those things that you want, it's really hard to start to get into a practice.

One of the things that we talked about was your first consultations with a client. How did that go when you were actually setting up your business and starting to offer paid services?

Bryn: We talked on the pre-chat a little bit about this. I was saying how when I started doing it and I had my first person sign up for a one-hour session for me, and honestly, I don't remember how much I was charging, but I think I was charging either $30 or $50. And I was so excited. I was like, "My goodness. There's money falling from the sky. I created this out of nothing." It was amazing. The other thing that was amazing for me was starting to work with people and to see that I was able to have an impact, that I was able to support them to make changes in their lives and the imposter syndrome that I think I've definitely struggled with and so many women struggle with, was starting.

I still struggle with it today to a degree, but definitely less so, compared to then. At that stage, when I look back now, I didn't really know what I was doing. I did this one one-hour thing and I was super excited, but then I didn't know how to get more clients or get more consistency. The first one was someone that I knew, obviously. It was a really slow growth, I would say, of doing that first one and being super psyched about it, but not really knowing how to increase my revenue and create consistency in my revenue.

It's been a whole journey. I think that was probably maybe, even four years ago. It's been a long journey for me. At that time, I was working full time as well. It wasn't the urgency to create a ton of revenue, it wasn't there, but it's definitely been a journey.

Karen: I think a lot of women and I've done this myself, because I've been consulting for eight years, and this year is actually the first time I've been a full-time consultant without something at least part-time giving me the regular income. What I was thinking about as you were describing your journey, it's an interesting thing that you were going through a lot of what you were also helping women with. Owning your value, then figuring out just how to make that consistency in your business, bring in more revenue, and decide how to monetize the expertise and experience that you had gained over time.

Bryn: I think that's a strength for me even now. What a lot of my clients are struggling with, I can say very definitively I've been there and it can get better, "Here are some supports. Here are some tools. Here's the path to move from where you are to where you want."

Karen: There's a lot of power coming from that place of empathy and understanding.

Bryn: Totally.

Karen: I was looking through your podcast and I noticed you've got a lot of great topics that you're covering on your podcast. Very relevant to women who are in business at practically every stage. I feel like so many of these topics, I've discussed with very experienced women and women who are very new to business as well. One stuck out to me, probably because I'm in marketing, a very recent episode, "Your inner child is sabotaging your marketing." I wanted to ask you about that episode in particular.

What are some of the things, because I read through the description, tell me a little bit about what you shared in that particular episode.

Bryn: Your inner child, I'm trying to remember the examples I gave, but I'll just speak off the cuff because I'm not going to remember.

Karen: That's okay.

Bryn: I guess I can talk about my inner child. That might be an easy pathway.

Karen: Sure.

Bryn: My inner child gets scared a lot. That's one of the go-to emotions for my inner child. I think all of our inner children are a bit different and have different go-to emotions. Yes, my inner child goes to shame and to fear. Those are probably the two top emotions that she goes to.

One example of fear is that it might make sense for me to invest in marketing in some way, it might make sense for me to hire a marketing expert, it might make sense for me to invest in Facebook ads or Instagram ads. There are different investments that can help my business but my inner child can freak out when I consider that my inner child is like, "No, no, no, it's not safe. Don't make the investment until you've made this much money or save this much money."

She's not really able to see the big picture of strategic investment is how you grow a business, is how you make more and more money. She's just in this place and because I do have some trauma in my personal history, she just goes to like, "It's not safe. We can't do it. No." She just freaks out and she's just like, "No." Part of what I talked about on the episode is to notice when that's happening, to notice when you're having an intense reaction to something that's maybe not that intense like thinking about buying something or losing a bit of--

One of the triggers for my inner child is, a client cancels and she's like "Why?" Totally freaking out even though it's one client, one session. She can go to a super negative place about that. To notice when you have what we would talk about is the difference between an overreaction and a right-sized reaction. A right-sized reaction is, a client canceled and it's like, "Oh, shoot." or "I was looking forward to that session."

A sign that it might be your inner child is when it's a very intense reaction. It's not that intense of an experience. You're losing maybe $100 for one week or depending on what your rates are, but that part of you is you can feel yourself going to an 11 out of 10 on the fear scale over something relatively small. The work that I do with my clients is starting to see when is it your adult that's reacting, when is it your inner child that's reacting and to start to pull those two pieces apart because when your inner child takes over, that's when you're going to make bad business decisions.

That's when you're going to maybe beg for the sale or not make an investment that could really drive your business forward. All of those things. Starting to be able to separate and say, "Okay." I'll say to myself, "Okay, this part of me, this young part of me is triggered." What I say to her, I talk to her. This is pretty common in inner child work is you talk to your inner child. I'll say like, "I hear that you're really scared, and you don't want me to invest in Facebook ads," or whatever she's freaking out about.

"You can be scared for as long as you need to be scared. I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to protect you. We are going to invest in Facebook ads. I hear that you don't like that. We're going to do it but I'm going to take care of you as we do it." Starting to develop a relationship with her and parenting her in some ways the way you would parent a child where it's like, "You are being a bit unreasonable. I'm not going to yell at you."

For me, I know because she's coming from a traumatized place, it makes sense that she's scared, it makes sense that she's freaking out. To be empathetic and kind to her but to also say, "This is a business decision. You don't get to make business decisions. When we're deciding what kind of ice cream to have, you can decide. I'll let you make that decision in my life."

When it's a business decision to tune in and make sure I'm coming from an adult place as opposed to this graspy place, this terrified place or this ashamed place, sometimes my inner child just wants to hide and be like, "Don't go on the podcast. Don't do the Instagram Live. Don't show up. Don't go to the networking event." She just wants to hide. To start to develop the relationship where it's like, "I hear you want to hide. I hear you're scared. We're going to go. I, adult Bryn, I'm going to do the talking. You don't have to do the talking. You're a kid, but we're going to go."

Karen: Yes. It's a common thing for women in particular. As comfortable as we can be, not always but I think women tend to be a little bit more comfortable with being vulnerable. We still hold ourselves back because maybe going on a Facebook Live or even recording a video, especially that seems to be a really common one, I know I've been hesitant to get into video. It's one of those things where I have clients resist these things all the time which is one of the reasons this stuck out to me in your list of podcasts is that sometimes I have to convince the client that, "No, really. This is a good idea for your business."

For me, I have to also balance the approach that I take which is to not pressure them to do things that they really don't want to do or don't have the mental space for. I do believe that the best marketing comes from a natural, de-stressed place in your business that you feel comfortable and confident. If you're really that resistant and lacking confidence in it, maybe it's a later thing.

Bryn: Totally.

Karen: It's not something to do right now but once you plant that seed of an idea, get them thinking about the possibility then it's easier to sell for a later date.

Bryn: Yes. Totally, when people are starting out, I definitely recommend playing to your strengths. When you're just starting and you're choosing between a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a newsletter, if you feel way more comfortable writing, start with the newsletter. You can always build those other channels later after you found your voice and your message a little bit and maybe feel a bit more confident.

Karen: Absolutely.

Bryn: I agree totally that we shouldn't be pressuring our clients and saying this is the only way and the work that I do with my clients is to say, "Who's really talking right now?"

Karen: Yes. I think that there's an interesting complement there because there's the advice that this is a good thing to do and it's something that you don't have to do right now but you can work on it and get there. And there is a path to get there.

Bryn: Totally, yes. For me, I feel it's like exposure therapy. The more Instagram Lives I do, the more comfortable I am. Some of my first ones were really crappy. I don't even watch them. I think the more that I do them, the better I get, the more comfortable I get and the more that they can help the people that I want to help. It's okay if your first one sucks. Your first one is going to suck, most likely.

You've never done it before but the way that you do get better is through practice and doing it again and again even if it's not something that does come naturally to you, which I can totally relate video—I know some people love the camera, and they light up as soon as the little red light or the green light, or whatever it is is on, and that's not me, that hasn't been my experience. For me, the more I can see how my imperfect showing up imperfectly is helping people and changing their lives-- Even if I stutter, or even if something happens, I lose my train of thought for a little bit, if I am able to overall give value, give people new ideas they haven't thought about before, encourage them to get their gifts out into the world, which is what I feel a lot about what my work is.

You have this thing, you have this skill as an artist or as a healer or you're meant to help people, and I just want to help you clear the stuff out of the way, so you can help the people that you're meant to help because they're waiting for you. They need your help, and your fear of showing up, which I get-- I, totally, have still. One of the things that helped me show up for my community and my audience for sure is thinking about, "Okay, it's not about me. It's not about me worried about getting flushed on the Instagram Live," which I do, face will turn red and it's embarrassing, but if I can think about them, and how can I help them, that can sometimes help me get over the hump.

Karen: I love that too with video, the bar isn't super high. Low production value is a perfectly acceptable way to present a video. I remember when people first started posting videos made from their phones, there were the people who were shocked, and gasping about it, "Why would you do that?" and then it just became the norm.

Bryn: Yes.

Karen: There's no reason to have a perfectly polished-- Even a podcast, I just said, no, I'm not going to edit that out.

Bryn: Right.

Karen: Having things perfectly polished all the time is fairly inauthentic, and it doesn't actually help you look human.

Bryn: Yes. In the Instagram world, where a lot of us are just showing our best pictures, our best days, and all of that, all of those sorts of things, sometimes what is going to really resonate with a potential client or customer is authentic, a little messy.

Of course, you want to create value, you want to be talking about something that your client or customer really is curious about, or needs help with. That's super important, we're not saying here to make a crappy video on a crappy topic, but to get over that perfectionism.

Karen: Exactly.

Bryn: Yes. One story that Brooke Castillo, who's a life coach who I really like-- Her podcast is The Life Coach School. In one of her podcast episodes, she talks about writing her first book. She wrote this book, and she was really worried about the typos, and what if it's not perfect. She put the book out into the world, people started reading it and buying it. She started getting the emails of, "Page 36, you missed the comma," and all these different emails.

Then, she got this email from this woman that said, "Reading your book changed my life." Her book was on weight loss, and what are the thoughts you're thinking about that. She was like, "I’ve never been able to achieve this goal, and your book changed my life." That made her realize typos are okay, you can have typos, and you can change someone's life. Those things can exist, coexist. You can stutter, or say, "Um," and you can change someone's life.

We don't need to be perfect in the way that we show up. We need to try our best, I think, to be authentic. I'm all about bringing quality into whatever I'm doing, but that perfectionism hurts us as business owners, and it hurts your community. It starves your community. They need you, they need the gifts that you have, the wisdom that you have. and when you hold that back, they don't get it.

Karen: It's true. I've struggled with perfectionism at various different times. I relate to a lot of what you've said today. A lot, and I think many of us do. It's a very common thing. I have certain friends, who are very trusted, that can tell me the honest truth unvarnished and they'll say to me, "Perfection is the enemy of done. Just get it done."

Bryn: Yes, totally.

Karen: I've started reminding myself of that, especially now because I'm getting started in this in a new way, in trying to make sure that I'm doing things a certain way, but I don't want to go too far. I don't want to do it all.

Bryn: Right. Right. Yes, it's a balance. It's totally a balancing act. The amazing thing about running your own business is you get to choose. You get to say, "I love podcasting. I love talking to women business owners about their business, so this is what I'm going to do. This is going to be one of my strategies. I hate Facebook Live, so I'm not going to do that."

You get to create a system, and then optimize it because one of the things, one of the inner child things, that I think this will be really valuable to your listeners is that, sometimes your inner child wants you to change your strategy, as opposed to optimizing your strategy. Say, you start a podcast and you do, whatever, 10 episodes, and you don't get any clients. You get zero clients from your podcast.

There might be a part of you that's like, "Okay, this isn't working. I guess the statistics are that live video is better, so let's totally take a sharp right turn," or one area that happens all the time, I think, is niche where someone has a niche and they start to post about it, create content about it, reach out to people about it, and they don't give it enough time. They don't create enough content and enough momentum, and they're like, "This niche isn't working. I'll go to this other niche."

Karen: "Let me water down my messaging." [crosstalk]

Bryn: Right. Yes, make it more broad. That's your inner child for sure.

Karen: Oh, yes. Yes.

Bryn: "I can help everyone."

Karen: Yes. The inner child, it goes the other direction, too. I work with clients all the time who don't have the target audience, far too broad. It's getting them to narrow things down, so they can actually target what they're saying and what they're doing to the right folks. That can be challenging. It's a hard mental shift, just to say that, "My product is not for everyone," or, "I don't want to work for everyone," because you feel like you're leaving money on the table, and you're not. You're actually making it easier for the right people to find you. I get why it's so hard to wrap your brain around that. Especially when it's a new business and you're so excited about what you're doing. You think you can help the whole world. [laughs]

Bryn: Yes. Some of the things I've heard, one of the anecdotes is, say, you're in love with your dogs and you love your dog so much you want to do like a professional photoshoot for them. Are you going to choose the photographer that takes pictures of families, landscapes, and pets? Are you going to take the wedding photographer that also does pet sometimes, or are you going to want to hire the pet photographer that also loves dogs and even has treats for them, and knows how to light a dog--?

I don’t even know anything about photography, but—where that’s their niche. Who are you going to hire if you want to spend a significant amount of money on a photoshoot for your dog? Thinking about it from the eyes of the customer. The other thing that I think is important for new business owners to know is that just because you pick a niche doesn’t mean you have to say no to someone who's outside of the niche.

Karen: Exactly. I've had that conversation a lot lately.

Bryn: Yes, all of your marketing is for pet photography, but then your friend says, "Hey, I would really love it if you shot my wedding." You're at a point where you don’t have that many clients yet because you're still building it up. You can say, "Yes." You can still do that wedding shoot, you're just not going to be-- You just need to choose who are you marketing to, who is your messaging for?

If your podcast talks about all different kinds of things, you're not going to have that dedicated listener that has a certain problem that they need help with, that they want to follow. They want to listen to all your podcast if it's only like one in five that’s interesting to them. They're probably not going to subscribe, and so it's about your marketing. You can say yes to anyone and still only market to one group of people.

Karen: Exactly, that is all very wise advice and I have thoroughly enjoyed talking with you, Bryn. Let's tell everyone how they can find you. You've got your website at brynbamber.com and where else can they find you?

Bryn: Yes, I'm pretty active on Instagram my handle is @bryn_bamber, and I'm on LinkedIn as Bryn Bamber, and I'm on Facebook as Bryn Bamber. I would say probably Instagram is the best place to connect with me. Feel free to send me a direct message if you have any questions about anything that we talked about today. I love talking about inner child stuff and I love talking about little business owners getting their beautiful work out into the world. Feel free to send me a direct message. Of course, the website is the mother ship, brynbamber.com.

Karen: You have a really valuable webinar coming up in August, what is that about?

Bryn: I have a webinar coming up called From Shame to Your Aligned Business. One of the things that can hold you back, and I know has held me back in my business and I see it a lot in my clients, is an unhealed shame from past experiences, from childhood experiences. It can trigger your inner child since we've been talking about the inner child [laughs] the whole time, but you guys understand what I'm saying there, can trigger your inner child to want to hide or to want to be perfect, to not want to get anything wrong, and can stop you from putting your beautiful work, your beautiful services out into the world.

This webinar is going to be looking specifically at that. How shame impacts your body, why it's important to really heal it, and then how to start taking those steps to heal these patterns of shame so that you can get your work into the world. You can help all of these people you're meant to help, and also you can have financial stability and abundance in your life. You can register for that webinar at tinyurl.com/shamewebinar and it will be available—I'm going to run it live and then it will be available on-demand after that. If you miss the live one it will still be available to you.

Karen: Fantastic. I'm actually signed up to attend next week. I can make it for the live webinar and we will make sure that all those links are included in the show notes so everyone can easily find you. And thank you again for spending time with me today, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

Bryn: Thank you so much. One last thing I forgot to mention is I have a podcast called the Burnout to Brilliance podcast. You are obviously listening to this, you're a podcast lover. If you want to learn more about how mental health and healing mental health can really let your business flourish, come over to the Burnout to Brilliance Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, all the places. Find me there.

Karen: I did go through and I was looking at some of the different topics that you're talking about: getting triggered, healthy boundaries, uncertainty, pandemic anxiety. These are so relevant and useful for business owners. Thank you for putting that out there.

Bryn: You're welcome. Okay, thank you so much for having me. This was amazing, super fun.